To the boy who emotionally destroyed me.

Thank you.

Since the day we met, I thought that I was going to love you for my whole life, that there were no other guys that would ever make me feel the way you did, but love is blind. Love is so blind that it blinded me from the emotional games and travesties that you had created between us. It was a back and forth game for years. Almost a decade, which is sad. I never thought I would be able to confess my love for you because I was so afraid of all the people that would judge me, but after I finally let go of those opinions, it was too late.

You had told me for years that you were in love with me, that you would do anything for me, but you didn’t. You kept feeding me lies and our relationship was built up of just that, lies. I left. I moved far away after we blew up in our faces. I saw you everyday and I was being eaten alive by the tension between us. I didn’t know if it was good tension or bad. I couldn’t ever talk to you because I was afraid. I was so nervous because I thought that you worshipped me. I was so afraid that I was going to say something wrong that would make you change your mind about me, but truth was, I was afraid I was going to realize that I was too good.

No, it wasn’t that I was too good. It was that I thought that I deserved you. I thought that there wasn’t any other guy that would worship me like I thought you did. In which, you played me like a tennis match. Back and forth, back and forth. It was like you were serving every single day and I was continuing to return the ball but you didn’t give it back.

After I moved away from you and your toxic love, I couldn’t find myself another relationship because I thought we were destined. I thought that you were the only one who I could ever be with and that no distance could keep us apart. There had to be a reason why we kept going back to each other. After months of fighting and realizing that things wouldn’t ever work out, I flipped the page. I always thought that if I had turned the page, that I would be ending the book, but really, it’s just a different chapter. A different chapter in my life where I understood and I matured and I grew.

So thank you, for emotionally destroying my confidence and making me think that I wasn’t ever good enough for you or anyone else. In the end, I realized that you deserved me, I didn’t deserve you. I deserve and need someone who can hold my hand in public when he takes me to the movies and walks beside me and not in front of me. Who wants to have a real functioning relationship and not one that is full of lies and hurt. Yes, I might in the end have switched the tables and played your game, but when we ended it for real, I didn’t cry, I didn’t hurt.

So I am grateful that you hurt me, but for allowing me to mature when you couldn’t. Now I know the red flags. Now I know when a guy is just playing games. Now I know what type to stay away from. I realized that walking away was the best choice I ever made and the best thing I could possibly do for myself.